Questions to Master Deshimaru

Question

How should one talk about God?

Answer

In our modern civilization people need some scientific justification if they are going to believe in a Supreme Being. There are too many buddhas, gods. People no longer realize what the words represent. For committed Christians they evoke something, as they do for committed Buddhists, although ultimately, in Buddhism, union with Buddha is not a goal and we speak of ku, void, emptiness. It is more scientific. In Europe what I say on this point seems simple, because God is the absolute. But in Japan and the Far East there are so many Buddhist sects, so many religions, it all becomes highly complicated because there are so many categories. In Japan, when a person dies, we say the person becomes Buddha, so the word Buddha has a connotation of death. Young people cannot understand.